Tag: Appy

I took part of this year’s Appy Days, which is an event bringing together companies and developers, with the shared purpose of developing a mobile App!

The event started on a Mondays morning in the idyllic Danish town of Silkeborg, with some interesting speakers speaking a language that only nerds understand. First speaker was Frank Allan Hansen from the Alexandra Institute. He gave a great overview of the development within applications for cell phone devices and summed up the different development platforms and their market share. Frank was followed by Martin Esmann from Microsoft, who gave a quick introduction to the Windows Phone Platform and why it belonged in the marketplace. Furthermore, was given a quick introduction to app development on the Windows Phone platform, which surprisingly seemed fairly easy to work on. That was also one of Martins primary sales arguments for the Windows Phone oppose to IOS or Android. According to Microsoft the cost of app development on the Windows platform was up to 50% cheaper than Apple IOS.

“Lunch also very much appreciated”

The presentations were all very technical, and it required full attention to keep track of the details. Therefore, was lunch also very much appreciated and some great networking took place.

After lunch the companies pitched their ideas to the forum of developers, graphics people and people like me called project managers. Some very interesting ideas were presented and after the pitch it was time to find the perfect match between developers and companies. I choose to join Arla Foods and immediately after the team had been settled, the discussions about features and functions began.

For the next two days our team of 5 would be working hard on saving time for families with kids, planning their weekly meals. The solution would be an app working across Iphone, Ipad and Web, all synchronised with the Arla’s Database supplying more than 4000 professionally tested recipes.

“You might think we were guinea pigs”

The two days at Arla HQ was a great experience and included a lot great snacks supplied by the wonderful ladies from “Karolines Køkken” (the kitchen where all recipes are developed.) You might think we were guinea pigs, but I like to think of us as the luckiest individuals at work. Thanks a lot to Arla for great treatment.

The final day of Appy Days was the day of the grand finale, where every team presented their app prototype. There was even a team that had a fully functioning app operating and ready to be place in the app store, which must be considered a great achievement for 72 hours of work. However, this app was not the winner of the completion. Instead the concept from “Be My Eyes” took victory for their solution to connect blind people with a community of volunteers ready to help out via a video conference call.

The concept of Appy Days was great, and my impression was that both developers and companies made good use of each other and that connections was made.